This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Neither of these people addresses a word to her or even looks her in the eye. One smears her cheeks with a clay-like substance while the other suddenly seizes a brush and begins to backcomb her hair, spritzing clouds of foul-smelling spray in her direction. Murder by chemical attack.

  Her head is tugged backwards and she has to steel herself not to cry out every time the brush makes a lunge for her face: what are you doing to me? Please let me be, please stop.

  And all the while they continue a conversation above her head:

  – He was like, whoah, and I was like, yeah.

  – Totally, totally out of it. And I mean. Out. Of. It.

  – Because she gave me this look and I was just, you know, hey.

  Her script is on her lap, beneath the robe. She knows it’s there because she can feel the edges, paper-sharp, against her wrist. She knows it, she’s almost sure. When she gets there, the words will come, as they always have. But what if they don’t? What if today is the first day when the words clog and jam, like cogs in a faulty machine, refusing to emerge? What if Timou has made changes to the words she wrote for herself to deliver? What if he’s done that again, without telling her? She will have to challenge him, question these alterations, in front of the whole crew and she knows they will all stand there, motionless, listening, as she and Timou bat objections back and forth.

  Already she feels that this is a bad day. She has the kind of headache where it hurts to turn her eyes, to move her jaw. She cannot tell yet whether it is an ordinary pain or if it will bloom into the kind that takes her over, replaces her with itself, consumes that part of her that is still her. It will insinuate itself into her body, like a dybbuk, and she will be forced to stand outside herself, watching. She has become prone – this is the term, she believes, it is what the doctors have said – to three-day-long attacks during which the world becomes filled with spikes and shards of light, so bright, so dazzling that she is unable to believe that no one else can see them. Quite usual objects will flare and glitter: the coffee machine, the bonnet-shaped head of a lamp, the latch of a window, a pair of sandals, the baby monitor. Everything becomes intolerable: the outlines of flowers on the mantelpiece, the circumference of a plate. People approach her and they carry with them unbearable flaring coronas, like prophets or devils.

  Claudette suddenly becomes aware of her foot. It is jiggling at the end of her leg, spasmodically: up, down, up, down, like the freeze-frame on a VHS. She looks at it there, as if it is disconnected from her. How can it do that? How can it focus so beautifully on something so—

  ‘Look up, please,’ the make-up girl says.

  Claudette looks up to the ceiling, where a fan circles its blades above their heads. The soupy air around the three of them yields the scent of deodorant, insect repellent, hairspray, the acrid taint of wet mascara, a chemical fabric conditioner, a whiff of marijuana – local, Claudette guesses.

  With a gunfire of static, the robe is un-Velcroed from her. The two attendants take a step back in unison, their heads on one side. One darts forward with a comb to tease a strand of hair into place; the other screws up her face in what seems to be a dissatisfied grimace.

  ‘I’m not sure about the …’

  ‘Mmm,’ the other agrees.

  They stare at her. Seconds jerk by on the clock up near the ceiling. Then they shrug.

  The taller one looks, if not quite at then near her.

  ‘You’re done, Ms Wells,’ she says, with a smile that reveals pink, healthy gums.

  Thank you, Claudette says, thank you.

  She steps out of the door and it is as if she has entered an oven. The heat swarms in at her face, her neck; it finds its way, immediate, insistent, under her clothes. India, she tells herself, they are in India. She had forgotten this. Hard to remember when you are escorted – like a child, like a criminal – from hotel to set and back again, when each of your meals is delivered to you on a tray, before you even realise you are hungry, when the person at the end of the room-service telephone speaks impeccable English and already knows your likes and dislikes, your requirements, your date of birth, your taste in décor, sleepwear, thread-count, toiletries, beverages, reading matter, music.

  Waiting for her at the trailer door is a person with a clipboard and headset. He doesn’t greet her but speaks about her into his microphone. ‘Ms Wells is leaving Make-up,’ he narrates, stepping in beside her. ‘We’re heading towards the set right now, ETA two minutes. Oh, she’s stopped to pick up something. No, we’re on our way again. Yes, hair and make-up finished. Yes.’

  She walks through groups of people. They part as she approaches, like iron filings repelled by a magnet. They look at her, then away quickly, too quickly, as if she might be enraged by their gaze, as if looking upon her might turn them to stone. She puts up a hand and touches her hair. Stiff with lacquer, texture like candyfloss. It can’t be her hair, no, not at all.

  Without warning, someone appears, stepping into her path, and lassoes her about the neck with something. A spotted scarf. Claudette stops, examines this person at close quarters. It is a woman in her twenties. She has black lines drawn in a beautiful arch on her eyelids, a wispy fringe, lips stained blackberry-purple, a brooch of a bird in flight pinned to her collar. She is tugging the scarf to the side, tying it, frowning, retying it.

  ‘I like your bird,’ Claudette says.

  The girl starts, as if a statue has spoken. Her hand flies to the brooch.

  ‘Oh!’ she says, flushing deep crimson. ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘It is the green of oxidised copper.’

  The girl glances up at her and her expression is one of fear. Why, Claudette wants to say, why are you afraid of me?

  ‘Stopped for Wardrobe,’ the man with the clipboard mutters into his mouthpiece. ‘Shouldn’t take too long.’

  The girl plucks at the scarf with trembling fingers, eyes lowered. Oxidised copper exactly, Claudette thinks, or absinthe or arsenic. Wasn’t arsenic once used as wallpaint? She imagines Victorian children running their fingertips along it, their clothes brushing up against it, lethal atoms adhering to the cloth, making their way to the skin, to the blood, where they spore and spin through the veins like—

  ‘That’s it,’ the girl whispers, and steps away, out of Claudette’s path. Claudette isn’t sure what else to do so she walks forward.

  ‘OK,’ the man with the clipboard says, ‘on the move again. Just about to pass Catering. Yeah, Ms Wells is all good for Wardrobe.’

  Claudette stops.

  ‘We’ve stopped,’ the man says.

  She turns her head one way: catering vans, the staff staring at her. She turns it the other way: a large lorry containing scaffolding, rigging.

  ‘I don’t know, she’s just looking around.’

  She suddenly recognises the source of her trouble. She can pinpoint what she needs, why she has this bolus of unease in her abdomen. Of course.

  She turns on her heel; she walks back the other way.

  ‘Er … we’re on the move but we’re going the wrong way … I don’t know …’ The man has to break into a trot to keep up with her. ‘I’ve no idea. Ms Wells? Er, Ms Wells? We need to go this way. They’re waiting for you. Ms Wells?’

  It’s easy to step things up. Claudette spends thirty minutes every day on a running machine. Her limbs glide into a sprint. The backcombed hair bounces back and forth on top of her skull, the scarf unravels and streams behind her.

  By the time she arrives at the trailer door, the man with the headset is far behind. She climbs the steps and yanks open the door.

  ‘Ari?’ Claudette says. ‘Where are you?’

  She is listening for the rhythmic pad of his feet, the mellifluous rise in his voice, saying, Maman, Maman. She has to hold that small body in her arms, has to press her cheek to the silk of his hair, has to look into those grave hazel eyes, she has to. Just for a moment.

  But the nanny is coming towards her: she has Ari’s sweatshirt in her hands; she is
holding her finger to her lips and shaking her head. ‘He’s just this minute gone to sleep,’ she is saying.

  The disappointment is physical: a plummet in the stomach, a clenching surge in her headache, a tensing in her forearms.

  ‘You just missed him.’

  She has to gulp at the air in the trailer so as not to cry.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘It’s OK.’ She moves towards the door of the little bedroom. ‘I’ll just sit with him for a minute.’

  Ari is lying on his side on top of the quilt, arms stretching out, as if seeking something. She can see that the nanny has given him the wrong blanket, not the one he likes, with the folded-over edges and the loose thread in the corner. And his velvet-faced fox is still on the shelf. She gets down the fox. She places it next to him on the bed. She dares to stretch out a hand and touch the tips of his hair but no more. She sits herself on the edge of the bed. She absorbs the breathing of her son. The room is clouded with his particular scent – citrus mixed with biscuit mixed with milk. She takes in the movement of eyes under lids, the shell-curl of his toes, the creases at his wrists. When she hears the trailer door slam open and a voice asking, where is she, she stands and tiptoes out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

  There is a man standing by the door. He wears headphones slipped down around his neck. He is tanned, his hair clipped short; the muscles of his chest and arms stand up under the white cotton of his shirt.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he says.

  This man is Timou. The idea seems stranger and stranger by the day. This is the man who once walked with her over the Thames and to a bar in Soho. A lifetime ago he met her at JFK airport, holding a sign with a picture of a cloud. They used to live together in Greenwich Village. He was the one who came into her hospital room after Ari was born and cried, his hand seeking hers, saying could she forgive him, could she ever forgive him, that she was his life, that he would do anything, anything at all, that he would never be so stupid again. She had been stunned, split, speechless, a tiny baby on her shoulder, her chest fizzing: it hurt to sit, it hurt to lie, it hurt to breathe. Even then, she had trouble convincing herself that he was this man and not a very close lookalike.

  And now here he is again, the person purporting to be her partner, her man, her other half, her co-parent, in her trailer. Behind him, outside the door, she knows, four or five people will be waiting. They follow him around all day. She doesn’t know how he stands it.

  ‘Claudette?’ he is saying.

  He is, she sees, expecting her to speak. So she does.

  ‘I had to see Ari,’ she says, and the words come out with relative ease and they sound, to her, reasonably normal. ‘Sorry.’

  A tendon flexes in Timou’s jaw. There is, just for a moment, a flash of light just above his shoulder, like a camera going off, or a small firework. Did anyone else see that? she wants to ask.

  ‘Right.’ He passes the papers he is holding from one hand to the other. ‘Well, can you come to set now?’

  Claudette considers this. She doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think she can. She feels her head shaking, no.

  ‘My darling,’ he says, coming forward and placing his arm about her shoulders, ‘there are one hundred and fifty people out there,’ he points with a pen that Claudette thinks he must have stolen from her desk as it’s the kind she likes, ‘all waiting for you to show up. You know that? One hundred and fifty people. And we can’t do a thing until you decide to grace us with your presence. We’re totally stuck without you.’ He attempts a smile. He is trying, Claudette can see this, he is being kind, but she can feel the tension radiating from him, feel the jitter of it in the bones and sinews of his arm about her neck.

  ‘Half an hour,’ is what she comes out with. ‘Give me half an hour.’

  Timou sighs. He does his effortful grin again. The kind you might give to a recalcitrant child or a mentally deficient person. He steps back and presses the pen – she is convinced it’s one of hers – to his forehead. The outline of it crackles like lithium on water.

  ‘All right. Half an hour. You can have half an hour, if you need it, of course you can.’ He points at her with the pen. ‘But no more, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ she says.

  He moves his black shape out of the trailer door, into the heat and daylight, and then he is gone. Claudette blinks as the door slams. She turns to the nanny and to her PA, Derek, who has appeared from the kitchen area, phone in hand.

  ‘Could you please give me a moment?’ she says, as pleasantly as she can.

  Sure, they say, of course, we’ll go get a coffee, we’ll see you later, take as long as you need.

  Then they are gone and Claudette is alone. She feels the silence fasten itself around her like a cloak.

  She stands for a moment, in the middle of the trailer. Ari is asleep in the bedroom; the door is in front of her. How she longs to take off these clothes, to loosen her hair from its clasp. What a relief it would be to slip them off until they pool around her ankles so she could step out of them, kicking them away from her. She would go into the bedroom and, without waking Ari, she would pull on that dress in faded indigo cotton, those sneakers with the lightning-bolt pattern.

  As if to quash this line of thought, she steps up to the door and peers out of the tinted glass. Nothing. No one. A few small figures over by the catering van. She assesses the distance between the door and the black SUV parked beside the trailer.

  What unfolds next in her mind takes the form of a film she might one day make, and one she alone will write and direct. She envisages a self that is not quite her but looks like her. This person is going into the bedroom, changing into her indigo dress, lifting Ari, who stays magically asleep, into her arms.

  No, Claudette thinks, she would first have to find their passports because she couldn’t look for them if she was already holding Ari. So, she looks for the passports before lifting him. Or would she perhaps have it all ready? A bag, pre-prepared and hidden, filled with all the necessary documents, their French passports, details of secret bank accounts, into which she would have been siphoning money? Yes, that would work better, would save time, would cut to the chase.

  So, a bag. Pulled down from a shelf somewhere. She is already in the dress, the sneakers, no need to show the change. Next, this Claudette, the one who isn’t quite her, would shake out her hair and stuff it under a wide-brimmed hat. The nanny’s. She would pick up the nanny’s sunglasses, the nanny’s security lanyard. She would put them on.

  How simple and yet so effective, Claudette thinks, as she stares out of the trailer window at the line of people waiting at the catering van. How simple it would be to lift Ari into her arms. To pick up the velvet fox and the favourite blanket. Simple to strap him into his car seat, to stow the bag in the back. It would take this Claudette, the escaping Claudette, a moment, when she sits in the driver’s seat, because it has been so long since she’s driven herself anywhere, but it will come back to her the minute she puts her hands on the wheel. Simple, too, to drive to the gates, to wave the nanny’s pass at the security guard. How lucky that the nanny has the same build, the same hair colour as her, so very lucky that is; the thought, of course, had never crossed her mind when she hired her, not at all.

  And then? Claudette runs a fingertip back and forth along the seal of the window, planning the next scene. They will be zooming, unstopped, undetected, outside the set, away from them all. The problem would be, Claudette thinks, as she sees Timou and his minders appear in the distance, over the brow of an incline, where to end the scene. What would come next?

  If she had things her way, with this film, the on-screen Claudette would pull up at a river, swollen and brown with fallen rain. Ari would be completely happy to get out of the car, to stand there, beside the river, beside the SUV, while she opens the car doors and releases the handbrake and rolls the vehicle into the water, just enough so that a small part of it still shows. She envisages what this will look like: the SUV roof sinking beneath the
oily current, the swirling eddies swallowing it, digesting it. She envisages the wheel tracks stretching from the road all the way to the riverbank. An accident, they will think. Police will be called, trucks, pulleys, divers. It will be a while before they realise that the car is empty, was always empty, and by that time she and Ari will be gone.

  Tricky to film, of course, expensive, but so effective, so devastating, so final.

  She leaves the door, leaves the scene of Timou and his people getting nearer and nearer. She goes through into the bedroom and looks down at her son. Ari has his fox tucked under his arm, his thumb in, his face tilted up towards her, absorbed in perfect, untrammelled, trusting sleep.

  Claudette has to press her face to the bed next to him to rally herself, to support her own weight, so searing is her sense of entrapment, the futility of such fantasies. She has sketched for herself the cage door left momentarily ajar, she has caught a flash of a life outside this one, something beyond, something other.

  After a minute or so, she hears the screech of the trailer door handle and hastily blots her tears on her sleeve. Staying, she tells herself as she stands up, means you get to do this work. You get to make this film. You get to finish it, then edit it, then send it out there. Then you get to make another. What, she asks herself, as she walks towards Timou, as she makes herself smile and nod at him – yes, she’s fine, she’s ready now, and the relief in his face is enormous, expansive, and it makes her think for a moment that, yes, he loves her and, yes, she loves him – what would she do without this work? How would she live, how would she feed and occupy her mind? Isn’t this what she wants? Where else could she find a valve, a vent, for the restlessness that has simmered inside her mind since she was a child? What else would she do with it, if not this?

  She reaches Timou. He puts an arm about her shoulders, as if taking possession of her, holds the nape of her neck in his hand. They go down the trailer steps, and as they walk together, he is murmuring in her ear about what they are about to film.